ve, and there is
the cordial laughter of a man, which implies and cherishes it."

Hogarth's works are before us all; and are lessons as much for to-day as
they were for yesterday. We have no intention of scrutinizing their
merits or defects; we write only of the influence of a class of art such
as he brought courageously before the English public. Every one is
acquainted with the "Rake's Progress," and can recall subject after
subject, story after story, which he illustrated. Comparatively few can
judge of him as a painter, but all can comprehend his moral
essays--brave as true!

His fearlessness and earnestness are above all price; independent, in
their high estate, of all praise. We would send "Marriage a la Mode"
into general circulation during the London season, where the market for
wives and husbands is presided over by interest rather than affection.
The matrimonial mart was as bravely exposed by the great satirist, as
the brutal and unmanly cock-fight, which at that period was permitted to
take place at the Cock-pit _Royal_, on the south side of St. James's
Park.

Society always needs such men as William Hogarth--true, stern men--to
grapple with and overthrow the vices which spring up--the very weeds
both of poverty and luxury,--the latter filled with the more bitter and
subtle poison. Calling to mind the period, we the more honor the great
artist's resolution; if the delicacy of our improved times is offended
by what may seem deformity upon his canvas, we must remember that we do
not shrink from _Hogarth's_ coarseness, but from the coarseness he
labored, by exposing, to expel. He painted what Smollett, and Fielding,
and Richardson wrote far more offensively; but he surpassed the
novelists both in truth and in intention. He painted without
sympathizing with his subjects, whom he lashed with unsparing bitterness
or humor. He never idealized a vice into a virtue--he never compromised
a fact, much less a principle.

He has, indeed, written fearful sermons on his canvas; sermons which,
however exaggerated they may seem to us in some of their painful details
of human sin and human misery, are yet so real, that we never doubt that
such things _were_, and _are_. No one can suspect Hogarth to have been
tainted by the vices he exposed. In this he has the advantage of the
novelists of his period: he gives vice no loophole of escape: it is
there in its hideous aspect, each step distinctly marked, each character
telling